Ladies First!

Ways to annoy a British aristocrat: fail to leave the moor after a shooting accident, high-five the butler, be French. But those offenses pale in comparison with the recent treachery of Lady Liza Campbell, a member of the Hares, a group of highborn women who are campaigning to overturn the right of male primogeniture. An acquaintance warned her that her involvement amounts to “a social-suicide note.” Another suggested, “You’re very good at Scrabble—why don’t you stick to that?” “In their minds, I’m some shouty lesbian madwoman,” Campbell said the other day over tea, in London. “Someone e-mailed me just going, ‘Hahahahahaha,’ and cc’ing all his male relatives.” Campbell, whose forebears massacred the MacDonalds at Glencoe in 1692, did not seem bothered by the stigma. “Everything is connected, from this sort of posh backwater to female circumcisions,” she explained. “Every adjustment we make spreads through society and improves women’s lot.” The Hares are supporting the Equality (Titles) Bill—the so-called Downton Abbey law—now being debated in the House of Lords, which would allow first-born daughters of the aristocracy to inherit titles.

Countesses and marchionesses storming the ramparts of castles their families already own: “Equality for Women in the Peerage,” as the Hares are styling their cause, seems about as sympathetic as business-class passengers lobbying for more legroom. But Campbell is winningly self-aware. “Perhaps some readers will be thinking, Why can’t the whole lot get flushed away?” she wrote in the Telegraph, in April. “My answer is that, if you want that to happen, make it your task, but, while the circus is in town, at least make it fair.” The Hares took their name from a comment made by Lord Trefgarne, who warned that changing the law so that a female royal baby could succeed to the crown, as Parliament did this year, would “set running the hare” on making the entire aristocracy gender-blind. (For those not versed in blood-sport metaphor, Lord Trefgarne is not a fan of the idea.)

Campbell, who doesn’t use her title, was born in 1959 at Cawdor Castle, in the Scottish Highlands, which has been in her family since the thirteenth century. She is an artist (her “Honest Heraldry” series includes coats of arms emblazoned with mottos such as “I killed my brother with an axe”) and a writer (her memoir, “A Charmed Life,” traces the unravelling of her father, the twenty-fifth Thane of Cawdor, who often reminded his daughters that “your fortune is your face”). When Campbell—the second of three daughters and five children—was born, her grandfather fell off a ladder, such was his dismay. She eventually married a big-game fisherman, with whom she lived for several years on a desert island in Indonesia. When her father died, in 1993, he left his castle to his second wife, a Czech-born countess. In her book, Campbell recalls the countess summoning her to a sitting room and inviting her to select one of her father’s fountain pens.

Campbell is blond, with a low voice and a black sense of humor. She was joined by another Hare, Victoria Lambert, a sunnier sort of blond woman. They both wore purple cardigans. Lambert, a journalist, who was born a commoner, became the Countess of Clancarty when she married her husband, the ninth earl. Their American interlocutor brought up a story about some “Hon.” or another who had been greeted by an immigration officer at J.F.K.: “Hey, hon!”

“My father went to New Orleans and was called ‘Earl,’ ” Campbell said.

“Once, at the airport, the person at the passport check said, ‘Move aside, I’m dealing with my first countess,’ ” Lambert added.

Campbell said, of the aristocracy, “I’m perfectly sanguine about seeing it go,” but Lambert seemed more enamored of its traditions. She has a stake in the primogeniture debate: because she did not produce a son, her husband’s title will die with him. Her daughter, Rowena, who is eight, will be the last Lady le Poer Trench. The Hares’ allies, she admitted, include a number of situational feminists. “People are interested if they have girls.”

Campbell said, “Ned Lambton”—Edward, the seventh Earl of Durham—“wrote on the Hares’ Facebook page that ‘You may as well fight for the rights of ants to spell their name with a capital A.’ ” (Lambton is battling in court to keep his older sisters from sharing any of their late father’s fortune.)

The American mentioned that a family she’d known growing up had a boat named Seven Misses and a Hit.

“That’s just it!” Lambert exclaimed. “It goes all the way through society—to farmers, to everyone. It isn’t just confined to aristocrats. And, until we do this, it will go on, because the influence goes through society from the top down.” ♦

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